Snow! And losing keys in it.

This morning, there was about a foot of snow. While clearing snow off my car, I somehow managed to drop my car and house keys into the snow on the ground without realising, which then got covered up by the fast falling snow as I finished up clearing off the rest of it. Cue an hour of kicking snow around looking for my keys, followed by giving in and walking to school in order to make second period when I was teaching with the student teacher.

Actually turned out I was teaching first period with her as well but hadnt realised, and arrived with only 15 mins left of the class. She was really nice about it, and my class was more interested in why I had been late than they've ever been in my lessons. It's weird - they can't speak English well but they managed to put me down perfectly, I explained what had happened and a guy at the back shouted out 'Genius!' (We learnt this word last lesson so at least they're studying I guess.) Some of the other guys wanted to know where I live, explaining in Japanese that they were going to look for the key and steal my car. My kids are fun.

Anyway, I had to take 2 hours of precious nenkyu (annual leave) to go and continue kicking snow around looking for the key. Happy ending as it turned out that the office here had a spare key for my house (they are so on top of things its scary) and inside my house I had a spare key for my car so that was okay, hopefully I'll find the originals when the snow melts. It's been a bad week for driving, on Monday after spraying my windscreen with de-icer, I came out the drive and turned directly into the sun which made a blinding effect off all the millions of tiny drops of water which were re-freezing and scraped a broken kerb, cutting and puncturing the tyre which then had to be changed. I'm hoping that all this shit driving I'm doing means it'll all be out of my system when I get back to London and I'll be a great driver... but that's probably a bit optimistic.

Now with pics: